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INTEREST GROUPS, ADVOCACY
AND DEMOCRACY SERIES
SERIES EDITOR: DARREN HALPIN
Political Party Funding

and Private Donations
in Italy
Chiara Fiorelli
Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy Series
Series Editor
Darren Halpin
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT, Australia
The study of interest groups and their role in political life has undergone
somewhat of a renaissance in recent years. Long standing scholarly themes
such as interest groups influence mobilization, formation, and ‘bias’, are
being addressed using new and novel data sets and methods. There are
also new and exciting themes, such as digital activism, the role of ICTs in
enabling collective action and the growth of global advocacy networks, are
being added. Contemporary debates about the role of commercial lobby-
ists and professionalized interest representation are also highly salient.
Together, they draw an ever larger and broader constituency to the study
of interest groups and advocacy. This series seeks to capture both new
generation studies addressing long standing themes in new ways and inno-
vate scholarship posing new and challenging questions that emerge in a
rapidly changing world. The series encourages contributions from political
science (but also abutting disciplines such as public policy and governance,
economics, law, history, international relations and sociology) that speak
to these themes. It welcomes work undertaken at the level of sub-national,
national and supra-national political systems, and particularly encourages
comparative or longitudinal studies. The series is open to diverse method-
ologies and theoretical approaches. The book series will sit alongside and
complement the Interest Groups & Advocacy journal.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14850
Chiara Fiorelli
Political Party
Funding and Private
Donations in Italy
Chiara Fiorelli
Department of Political Sciences
Sapienza University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy Series

ISBN 978-3-030-73868-6 ISBN 978-3-030-73869-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73869-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction: The Informative Power of Private Political

Financing 1
2 Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Political

Financing 7
3 Private Political Financing: Between Regulations and

In-depth Research 31
4 The Connective Capability of Italian Political Parties 57
5 The Donor’s Dilemma: External Donations Between Party

Organisations and Candidates 83
6 The Financial Appeal of Political Parties: Looking for the

Determinants of Donors’ Preferences109
7 Conclusion: Winter Is Coming and Political Parties Will

Be Left Out in the Cold.133
v
vi Contents
Appendix A141
Appendix B149
Index155
Abbreviations1
ADP Movimento per l’Autonomia Democratici Progressisti

CCD Centro Cristiano Democratico
DC Democrazia Cristiana
FDI Fratelli d’Italia
FI Forza Italia
FV Federazioni dei Verdi
IDV Italia dei Valori
LMP Lista Marco Pannella
LN Lega Nord
LR Movimento per la Democrazia—La Rete
M5S Movimento 5 stelle
MCS Movimento dei Cristiano Sociali
MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano
PCI Partito Comunista Italiano
PD Partito Democratico
PDL Popolo delle Libertà
PDS Partito dei Democratici di Sinistra
PLI Partito Liberale Italiano
PPI Partito Popolare Italiano
PR Partito Radicale
PRC Partito della Rifondazione Comunista
PRI Partito Repubblicano Italiano
PS Patto Segni
PSDI Partito Socialista democratico Italiano
1
Names and labels of political parties analysed.
vii
viii ABBREVIATIONS
PSI Partito Socialista Italiano

SC Scelta Civica
SVP Südtiroler Volkspartei
UDC Unione di Centro
UV Union Vaildotaine
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Distribution of number of external donations collected by

parties and candidates. Source: Treasury of Chamber of
Deputies. Author’s elaboration. Note: The graph shows the
number of private donations received in different years by party
organisations and candidates divided in political formation. The
total number of donations considered is 853. During
1987–1989, parties reported 37 private donations over or equal
to €5,000, while candidates 30. In 1994, the number of
donations declared by parties was 98 and by candidates 207. In
2013, parties reported 144 private donations over the threshold
while candidates 337 101
Fig. 6.1 Financing appeal of political parties. Source: Treasury of
Chamber of Deputies (Author’s elaboration). Note: Lines
divide political actors on the median amount reported taking
together party’s central organisations and candidates’ revenues.
Columns divide parties for the number of different specific
interests represented in their financial declarations (less than 3 =
few; more than 3 = many). Parties in Italics are those more
personalised (more than 50% of their total external revenues
come from candidates). Chi-squared (amount × interests) =
20.503; p = 0.000. Pearson (r) = 0.765; p = 0.000 124
ix
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Regulation on Private Political Financing in Different

Democratic Countries 35
Table 3.2 Distribution of Total Income of Italian Parties for Different
Sources (adjusted 2014 Euro) 49
Table 4.1 Distribution of Private Donations between Internal and
External Sources in Different Election Years 67
Table 4.2 Dispersion of External Money in Different Election Years
(amount adjusted at Euro 2014) 68
Table 4.3 Distribution of Private Donations among PIP in Different
Election Years (adjusted to Euro 2014) 69
Table 4.4 Distribution of Number of Private Donation and Type of
Donors in Different Electoral Years (% of donations) 70
Table 4.5 List of 10 Big Donors for each Election Year (amount
adjusted to Euro 2014) 72
Table 4.6 Interest System Represented through Financial Donations
to Political Parties 1987–2013 (%) 73
Table 4.7 Connective Capability of Political Parties 76
Table 5.1 Distribution of Private Donations to Candidates from
Different Private Sources 92
Table 5.2 Distribution of Candidates’ Private Donations among PIP
in Different Election Years (adjusted to Euro 2014) 93
Table 5.3 Distribution of Number of Private Donations to Candidates
and Type of Donors in Different Electoral years (% of
donations)95
Table 5.4 Interest System Represented through Financial Donations
to Candidates 1987–2013 (%) 96
Table 5.5 Connective Capability of Candidates 98
xi
xii List of Tables
Table 5.6 Distribution of External Donations According to the

Ideological Leaning of Political Parties and Candidates
during National Election and European Election Years
(amount adjusted at EU 2014) 99
Table 6.1 Average Private Donations Reported by Political Parties
According to Different Factors (Natural Logarithm of the
Amount)119
Table 6.2 Average Private Donation Reported by Candidates
According Different Factors (amount adjusted at EU 2014) 121
Table 6.3 Distribution of External Donations between Parties and
Candidates Grouped According to Governmental Role after
the Election (amount in 2014 values) 123
Table B.1.1 Year 1987 150
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Informative Power

of Private Political Financing
Abstract Since at least two decades, the political party’s function as the
primary collective actor has been questioned from a variety of perspec-
tives, and many scholars have focused on the progressive delegitimisation
that threatens to alter its representational role. The dynamics of political
financing, particularly the role of private money, enable a novel under-
standing of the linkages between political representatives and civil society.
This work attempts to stimulate discourse about the relationships between
donors and political actors by examining the case of Italy in a comparative
context.
Keywords Political financing • Private donations • Political parties •

Italian case • Representation
Without a doubt, significant changes in the way politics operates have

arisen over the past 50 years. As a result of the restructuring of critical,
long-standing relationships between individuals and the state, new respon-
sibilities and behaviours have been established for both private citizens and
public actors. The hollowing out of conventional cleavages and citizens’
political behaviour, as well as their modes of representation, has defined
new relations between civil society and the political parties that represent
their interests. Political parties, on the other hand, have remained the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Fiorelli, Political Party Funding and Private Donations in Italy,
Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73869-3_1
2 C. FIORELLI
most powerful collective players, owing to their direct access to public

office through democratic elections.
However, among Western democracies, political parties now are facing
critical challenges that affect their organisational nature and their repre-
sentational role as legitimised political actors (Ignazi, 2014; Scarrow et al.,
2017). From the organisational perspective, as a collective body, the polit-
ical party has suffered a dramatic shift from the mass party model to the
diffuse cartel party model (Katz & Mair, 1995). In many democracies, the
dependence of political parties on state subsidies has corresponded to their
progressive detachment from the roots of civil society.1 In addition, in the
context of the globalized world, national politics have created fragmented
societies that have increased their demands on the political system. With
regard to representational dynamics, both citizens and parties have
adopted new electoral strategies by emphasising the image of party leaders
or the intensive use of media to disseminate political messages.
Consequently, such images have been promoted as voters’ shortcuts,
which have led to the progressive personalisation of politics, thus under-
mining the role of the political party as a collective actor (Karvonen,
2010). Similarly, the interests’ system, which represents the various inter-
est groups in a society, has become increasingly differentiated and frag-
mented in many countries (Mahoney & Baumgartner, 2008; Beyers et al.,
2008; Bolleyer, 2018), leading to narrower representation with specific
policy aims that challenge the role of political parties in the articulation of
citizens’ demands.
Overall, political parties, as traditional political collective actors, are los-
ing their role as intermediaries channelling societal demands. This down-
ward trend poses fundamental questions about how democratic institutions
can handle political conflict when conventional intermediaries no longer
represent the current climate.
Political parties remain the most important democratic actor: powerful
for their direct access to the legislative arena and government position.
However, they risk being more and more delegitimised and left alone
without the support of civil society actors. The study of political financing
brings a different perspective to analysing the dynamics of the contempo-
rary challenges to political parties. If political finance is understood as
integral with the broader political system, investigating the relations of
political parties to their funding has the potential to contribute to under-
standing the distribution of political power and identifying the aims of
1 INTRODUCTION: THE INFORMATIVE POWER OF PRIVATE POLITICAL… 3
parties that are increasingly oriented to a market economy of electoral

competition (Scarrow, 2004).
Most comparative studies of political finance have focused on differ-
ences that emerge from the adoption of various legal regulations among
democratic countries. Knowledge of the variety of political financing sys-
tems is fundamental in understanding macro phenomena such as the
increase in public state funding. However, only a few studies have exam-
ined the micro-dynamics of the role of private money in politics. Moreover,
the investigation of micro-dynamics often involves country-based research
(see Ewing & Issacharoff, 2006; Mendilow & Phélippeau, 2018). As long
as political finance is a dependent phenomenon defined by the political
party system and political competition, the influence of country-based fac-
tors cannot be neglected. The dynamics related to the funding of political
actors could reveal the connections with civil society representatives, espe-
cially in those contexts where formal and regulated contacts are impossible
to analyse because of their absence, lack of regulation or hidden histori-
cal habits.
The Italian case is particularly interesting considering that important
political changes in recent decades have significantly modified the party
system in the country, during the transition from the so-called First to
Second Republic (during the early 1990s), and its chronical instability.
Furthermore, there is a lack of knowledge regarding private political
financing because of the predominant role of public subsidies in ensuring
the survival of political parties during the last 60 years. The study of pri-
vate financing in a political system where public funding is predominant
could be considered a fruitless exercise. However, the need to prove the
informative power of private party revenues is amplified by the urgency to
fill the gap in this knowledge due to the recent reform in political financ-
ing—in 2014—which brought the Italian system towards a form of private
political financing. Information regarding private financing trends over a
significant period of time could shed light on not only the strategies used
by political parties and donors to create political connections but also the
changes in the representation of the interests’ system in political financing
activities and electoral politics.
Though corruption dynamics are inherent in Italian politics, they are
not reflected in official statistics, and hence the extent of this problem is
underestimated. Nonetheless, the study of official data, which is far from
comprehensive, may lead to the systemic detection of broad financial pat-
terns by allowing for a greater emphasis on the relationships between
4 C. FIORELLI
actors than on the magnitude of private financing, as well as the networks

of financial contributions and their changes over time.
This work is organised in the following manner. Chapter 2 engages
with a comparative discussion of the issues confronting democratic parties
as representative players in Western societies as they adapt to emerging
organisational dynamics and representational strategies. Due to the fact
that the election moment is a primary democratic asset, the rising costs of
political competition have elevated money’s fundamental status as a shaper
of the democratic process. Political financial systems in developed democ-
racies differ according to funding sources, permissible expenditure catego-
ries and reporting requirements. A special focus is placed on the risks
associated with private money and the need to close the information gap
about those risks. In this context, an emphasis on party–group interactions
enables the identification of the interests and participation of members of
civil society. The article discusses the major theoretical approaches.
Chapter 3 examines the comparative research on private political financ-
ing. The need to expand cross-national research requires studies that pro-
vide in-depth knowledge on single country-specific patterns. The Italian
case study was selected to fill the gap in empirical research concerning the
dynamics of private political financing, particularly in the light of the trou-
bling history of the Italian political financing regime. The general theo-
retical approach of this work and the hypotheses regarding the trends in
the private financing of political parties as collective actors are defined in
this chapter. The data collection includes 1,680 cases that represent single
private financial donations. The construction of three different sets of data
on political parties, political candidates and a combination of the two will
allow for a systematic analysis of the private revenues of Italian political
parties.
Chapter 4 investigates the position of political parties as organised
political actors. Their private revenues are examined over a considerable
time span that encompasses several systemic changes that occurred
between 1987 and 2013. The focus is on the financial ties formed between
the party system and the interests’ system. The Italian interests’ structure
has been divided and differentiated in recent decades, which should be
reflected in financial donations. Lobbying operations are not limited in
Italy, and organised relations between political actors and interest groups,
that is, formal alliances governed by party statutes, do not exist. The new
perspective on researching party–group relationships reflects on the impact
of financial assistance on electoral competition. The primary goal of this
1 INTRODUCTION: THE INFORMATIVE POWER OF PRIVATE POLITICAL… 5
chapter is to explore and compare the potential of Italian political parties

to interact with the various interest groups identified in society at any par-
ticular time. Using the cartel party model, I anticipate finding relation-
ships between parties and groups, as well as a weakening of parties’ overall
capacity to communicate with an increasingly segregated world.
The shifting representational trends in the relevance of personalisation
in politics are addressed in Chap. 5. Analysing private funds raised by poli-
ticians rather than national parties will expose various patterns. The results
will demonstrate that the radical personalisation of politics is mirrored in
fundraising patterns, with external contributors overwhelmingly drawn to
individual candidates rather than the parties they serve.
The final empirical segment, Chap. 6, will look at the donor’s point of
view and why donors might favour one political actor to another. Variations
of private revenues would be determined by the economic and personal
profiles of political parties and candidates, respectively. In addition, a pre-
liminary classification of political actors’ funding appeals will be created.
The conclusions of individual chapters will be analysed together in the
closing remarks, and consequences for the whole political system will be
addressed. Over the last 30 years, the growing division of the interests’
mechanism has been reflected in the political funding networks generated
by private contributions. These contributors have no ideological links to
political parties and seem to favour a more pragmatic approach to financial
funding. Furthermore, the crisis of collective political bodies—political
parties—emphasizes the role of candidates in obtaining financial resources.
The power to attract financial contributions is not spread evenly among
political actors, but it is closely linked to political outcomes and political
opportunities. These results show that adapting to the new legislation has
accelerated the crisis of parties and aggravated disparities in the allocation
of money, which threaten to exacerbate the differences in the distribution
of political power in the Italian party structure, which is now in the hands
of private revenues.
Individual work is never done alone. To be totally honest, I owe too
many people for their explicit or indirect contributions over the last few
years. However, for the sake of simplicity and synthesis, I feel moved to list
Professors Paolo Bellucci, Domenico Fruncillo, Piero Ignazi, and Gianluca
Passarelli, who I consider to be my mentors. I was fortunate to collaborate
with them and learn from them. They provided me with encouragement,
confidence, advice, pretty severe criticisms—the only ones that
6 C. FIORELLI
mattered—and time. Naturally, this work originates in my head. I am

solely responsible for all that has been written and revealed here.
Note
1. A fundamental contribution to the empirical and comparative research on
party organization is given by the Political Party Database Project (https://
www.politicalpartydb.org/). It examines party resources, decision-making
mechanisms within parties, party statutes, and the results of decision-making
procedures within parties in a number of democratic democracies (see
Scarrow et al., 2017).
References
Beyers, J., Eising, R., & Maloney, W. (2008). The Politics of Organised Interests
in Europe: Lessons from EU Studies and Comparative Politics. West European
Politics, 31(6), 1103–1128.
Bolleyer, N. (2018). The State and Civil Society. Regulating Interest Groups, Parties
and Public Benefit Organizations in Contemporary Democracies. Oxford
University Press.
Ewing, K. D., & Issacharoff, S. (Eds.). (2006). Party Funding and Campaign
Financing in International Perspective. Hart Publishing.
Ignazi, P. (2014). Power and the (Il)legitimacy of Political Parties. Party Politics,
20(2), 160–169.
Karvonen, L. (2010). The Personalisation of Politics: A Study of Parliamentary
Democracies. ECPR Press.
Katz, R., & Mair, P. (1995). Changing Models of Party Organization and Party
Democracy. The Emergence of the Cartel Party. Party Politics, 1(1), 5–28.
Mahoney, C., & Baumgartner, F. (2008). Converging Perspective on Interest
Group Research in Europe and America. West European Politics, 31(6),
1253–1273.
Mendilow, J., & Phélippeau, E. (Eds.). (2018). Handbook of Political Party
Funding. Edward Elgar.
Scarrow, S. (2004). Explaining Political Finance Reforms. Competition and
Context. Party Politics, 10(6), 653–675.
Scarrow, S. E., Webb, P. D., & Poguntke, T. (Eds.). (2017). Organizing Political
Parties: Representation, Participation, and Power. Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Challenges and Perspectives in the Study

of Political Financing
Abstract Democratic party transformations are a central topic of research

in contemporary political science. The deterioration of the mass party
model has raised many concerns about the evolution and prospects of
democratic participation. The goal of this chapter is to show how the cur-
rent discussion on party organisation is from a particular point of view:
funding the political campaigns. From this vantage point, the organisa-
tional dynamics of the party, as well as its representational objective, are a
function of financial capital. Additionally, the financial framework enables
an examination of the party’s links to civil society representatives and their
specific interests.
Keywords Cartel party • Political financing • Private money • Party–

group relations

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73869-3_2
8 C. FIORELLI
2.1 The Contemporary Party Model

and Representational Dynamics
In democratic societies, two fundamental assumptions apply: first, that

elected politicians should serve the public interest, and second, that peo-
ple should be assured inclusive participation. On the one side, participa-
tion and the right to oppose are the primary determinants of a country’s
degree of democratisation (Dahl, 1971). On the other hand, liberal
democracy is essentially founded on two factors: representation, defined as
‘acting in the interests of the represented in a manner responsive to them’
(Pitkin, 1967: 209), and the presence of repeated, open elections to ensure
the elected representatives’ legitimacy. Political parties, as collective actors,
play a critical role in representing the cleavages of civil society through
their competition in democratic elections (see Dahl, 1971; Schattschneider,
1942; Lipset & Rokkan, 1967).
However, societies are undergoing rapid change, and they are now con-
fronted with threats that attempt to disrupt conventional players in politi-
cal competition. Political parties are in decline, with membership in
existing democracies dropping fast almost everywhere (Mair & Van
Biezen, 2001; Scarrow, 2002; Scarrow et al., 2017). Fewer people are
choosing to affiliate themselves and their interests with traditional parties
(Dalton, 2002), and overall confidence in political parties and their politi-
cal skills has dropped considerably (Pharr et al., 2000).
As Ignazi (1996, 2017) noted, the party decline concerns the mass
party model, which is defined by a common shared ideology, a high level
of participation by members and funding by members’ contributions.
Many studies have argued that this party model has failed to meet the
demands of the new Western publics, namely to articulate and aggregate
interests (see Lawson, 1980). Others have claimed that the positive results
achieved by the mass party model, in terms of integration and welfare poli-
cies, led citizens to perceive this type of organisation as obsolete (see
Franklin et al., 1992). Changes in the structure and ideological dimen-
sions of parties initially appear to have arisen in the 1960s. The catch-all
party (Kirchheimer, 1966) evolved into the cartel party (Katz & Mair,
1995), and parties have now reached the point of being defined as public
utilities (Van Biezen, 2004). The changes of definition over time encapsu-
late the theoretical and organisational changes that have occurred, giving
life to the idea that parties are historical entities (Mair & Mudde, 1998).
2 CHALLENGES AND PERSPECTIVES IN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL… 9
The ideological profiles of citizens, and the way they participate in

political life, are also changing. In the political science literature, decline in
cleavage voting (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967) has been explained via two dif-
ferent, but complementary, perspectives: the sociological and the political.
The sociological perspective looks from the bottom up, and refers to
the general changes in society. It correlates the decline of cleavage voting
with four factors, as follows: rising living standards (Kitschelt, 1994); the
rise of alternative social bases of interests (Dunleavy & Husbands, 1985);
the expansion of mass higher education, with the consequent social mobil-
ity undermining class solidarity and leading to a more individualistic and
instrumental view (Franklin, 1985); and the relevance of new political val-
ues arising from economic changes (Inglehart, 1990).
The political perspective refers to the specific changes that occur in
politics, and emphasises the role of political elites and organisations in
politicising every single issue, including class (Sartori, 1969). Thus, party
positions also create class allegiances (Przeworski, 1985), and changes in
position contribute to changes in class voting.
Class cleavage and the degree of polarisation of political competition
influence each other. From the political perspective, as Sartori (1976)
claimed, polarisation of political competition influences decidability by
increasing choices for the electorate; it also influences government stability
by making it more difficult to aggregate the different demands. However,
the absence of parties from the extreme left and right engenders a centrip-
etal competition that seeks voters at the centre of the ideological spec-
trum. Changes in electoral campaigns and positioning issues accompany
the change of party structure; the effect is a ‘strategic move to the centre
of the ideological spectrum by a vote-seeking party’ (Evans & Norris,
1999: 94). Issue-based competition can be defined as intra-party competi-
tion, in which issues should dominate the party political discourse
(Carmines & Stimson, 1986). From a sociological perspective, as Green-
Pedersen (2007) stated, issue-based competition arises from the decline of
social-structural voting and from the increasing volatility in voting choice
(Mair, 2002).
Irrespective of the theoretical perspective we adopt, this scenario implies
the progressive departure of parties and politicians from the traditional
cleavages of civil society. It manifests itself in the trend towards convergent
policy agendas and no-conflict electoral campaigns, and by the increasing
number of policy choices for which other levels of governance are account-
able from the national perspective (see Crum, 2018).
10 C. FIORELLI
The transformations described above are all well aligned with the catch-
all party model. Kirchheimer (1966) was the first to analyse the decline in
policy differences among Western political parties. From the point that the
decline began, parties have sought political support from right across the
electorate, rather than attempting to appeal to a particular ideological,
class-based view. In addition, system-level trends, such as the increasing
importance of the middle class and the rise of new forms of mass media,
have weakened the old party links with civil society. The subsequent emer-
gence of the cartel party model (Katz & Mair, 1995) shows that parties no
longer require strong contacts with civil society or its intermediaries, and
that state funding for parties plays a role. In contrast with the strategic
evolution of parties, Kitschelt (2000) stressed the role of external causes in
the ideological convergence of rival parties, such as the sophistication of
the electorate, who can now reward or punish parties by strategic vote
switching. Scholars may diverge in their theoretical approaches, but all
agree that political parties are becoming progressively distant from civil
society.
Regardless of whether the cartel party model successfully describes
some of the dynamics extant in our societies, the theoretical argument
around it usually emphasises government, rather than representation
(Enroth, 2015). Mass party organisation has waned, and the traditional
form of political representation has faded away. Indeed, many studies have
found that membership of political parties, trade unions and religious
organisations is declining almost everywhere in Western democracies. This
has led to a more individualised form of politics and a subsequent dramatic
change in the representational model (among others, Van Biezen &
Poguntke, 2014). On the one hand, traditional parties are becoming elec-
toral brands, useful for single politicians, leaders first, to organise and
structure their political competition. On the other hand, citizens’ disaffec-
tion with traditional political actors increases the role of personalities and
individual characteristics as a heuristic to form their political opinions.
From this perspective, the personalisation of politics can be considered as
a phenomenon that has saved political parties from their complete defeat.
The mass party model has ended. Citizens now behave differently in
the political arena, as they search for representation. New interactions
have developed between civil societies, originators of demands and the
parties, intermediary executors of the people’s will. In this scenario, inter-
est groups operate independently of political parties and offer an alterna-
tive to the process of intermediation provided by traditional parties. Thus,
the articulation of demand increasingly becomes the province of interest

organisations (Katz & Mair, 1995; Mair, 2013; Schmitter, 2001; Van
Biezen & Poguntke 2014).
Nonetheless, political parties remain the most powerful political actors,
with their direct access to public office. Despite evidence of their decline,
they play an important connecting role between the state and the citizens.
The role of political parties as principal and legitimate competitors for
public office has not been undermined, and their capacity to aggregate
different demands is still important. They remain at the core of the demo-
cratic system and central to an understanding of the way the system works.
2.2 Political Money: Why Does It Matter?

The transformations described above challenge the stability of political
parties as collective actors. However, the roles that they play in a demo-
cratic society can still be defined as fundamental. Key (1942) described the
roles of parties in a tripartite framework: party in the electorate, which
explains the role of linking individuals to the democratic process via vari-
ous forms of incentives and participation; party as organisation, which
concerns activities such as recruiting the political leadership, training
political elites, articulating political demands and aggregating political
interests; and party in government, or all the activities that are linked to the
exercise of power. This work focuses on the party as organisation, which
allows me to consider the central role of parties in the articulation and
aggregation of interests (Almond et al., 1993; Budge et al., 1987). At the
centre of the analysis is the dimension of the organisational power of par-
ties, which explains organisational functions and activities in terms of alli-
ances and power conflicts among those actors who are part of the
organisation (Panebianco, 1982: 11). Panebianco argued that the organ-
isational aspect of a party is influenced by two fundamental factors: first,
the organisational history, which goes from the initial imprinting of a new
organisation and provides the legacy for the subsequent transformation,
and second, the set of relationships with the environment, which define the
degree of autonomy reached by the party (Panebianco, 1982).
As to their organisational life, parties must face areas of uncertainty that
should be taken under control in order to avoid organisational unpredict-
ability. These are as follows: know-how, relationships with the environ-
ment, internal communication, formal rules, recruitment and financing.
The latter constitutes a crucial resource for external donors and can be
12 C. FIORELLI
used to maintain a certain degree of control over parties (Panebianco,

1982). As Raniolo stated, in politics the mobilisation of resources is not a
neutral issue or a simple technical element. It is rather an expression of
instrumental, situational and axiological rationality (Raniolo, 2013: 75).
Thus, resources—financial, staffing or the type of organisation—can be
regarded as party legacies, and they contribute to determining parties’
development.
Of course, the level of institutionalisation influences the degree of
unpredictability. Indeed, institutionalisation means the progressive auton-
omy of a party from external pressure, together with a high level of control
over the areas of uncertainty. Therefore, it is easy to imagine that a party
that is deeply institutionalised would be more autonomous and indepen-
dent in its choices—even its financial choices—than a party that is highly
dependent on its external environment.
Turning to the specific issue of political financing, Melchionda (1997)
stated that political finance concerns the way political actors acquire and
spend money, as well as the influence that donors exercise over political
actors. Pinto-Duschinsky (2002) noted that political financing is normally
understood as ‘money for electioneering’, but it also covers other activi-
ties, such as the maintenance of permanent offices, polls, policy research,
political education, public campaigns and the mobilisation of voters.
However, the actual centrality of the electoral moment is recognised.
As Alexander stated, ‘politics is big business and has become a major
industry’ (Alexander, 1992: 78); thus, the central role of financing is self-
evident. The mass party usually emphasised the role of participation as the
major resource against the big money coming from businesses and special
interests, but with the crisis of this type of organisation, things may have
changed, and parties may require other sources of income in order to be
competitive on the political scene. Alexander (1989) believed that money
is an element of political power because it buys what is not, or cannot be,
volunteered.
Politics is increasingly costly. At the foundations of the increase of
expenses in politics we can identify three different processes: the intensifi-
cation of the electoral competition; the introduction of new technologies;
and the need for greater professionalisation and more staff (see Farrell,
2006; Norris & Van Es, 2016). The process of progressive commodifica-
tion of politics and the increasing relevance of party financing are conse-
quences of phenomena that were first identified by Kirchheimer (1966), as
follows: the decline of social roots and an ideological basis; less
importance of members; more influence of leaders and professionals; scle-

rosis of party systems; and programmatic flattening. Those features imply
a progressive departure of parties from civil society and its lines of conflict.
They also favour a shift from labour-intensive to capital-intensive cam-
paigns, due to the decrease in voluntary work and the new technologies
employed (Norris, 2000; Sorauf, 1988). As Melchionda stated, in such a
situation, corporations and interest groups could not influence policymak-
ing as usual, via lobbying activities directed towards legislative assemblies,
leaving the control of the electoral scene to the major parties. Instead,
they could attempt to directly interfere with the electoral process by
choosing candidates with the aid of funding (Melchionda, 1997: 173).
Nassmacher (2009) contested the widespread claim of a costs explosion
in politics. His view was that increasing party spending is primarily driven
by the growing supply of money in politics. Therefore, the spring that
triggered the mechanism of public funding in many countries was the will
to establish an autonomous party system. State subsidies can be viewed as
parties’ direct answer to the transformation of the political role of interest
groups, together with the decline of the traditional organisation of parties
(Melchionda, 1997). Therefore, state funding has generally been under-
stood as a solution to corruption (Nassmacher, 2003; Pierre &
Svåsand, 1992).
Indeed, public intervention could regulate and limit the private money
(external to the public sphere) that circulates around parties: contribution
limits can be introduced, with the aim of preventing the exchange of
favours in elections, while expenditure limits aim to prevent parties and
candidates from buying elections (Van Biezen, 2010). In other words,
expenditures influence the external process (relationships between actors),
while incomes have far more influence on the internal political process
(within the same political actor).
Nevertheless, public funding could be insufficient for party subsistence,
and political actors could easily be persuaded to use illicit, or illegal, prac-
tices to meet their financial needs. Thus, the warning concerning the risk
of private money in politics should always be considered: money distorts
political equality because greater financial means will lead to greater politi-
cal influence (Fischer & Eisenstadt, 2004). Therefore, the increase in pub-
lic funding is thus an ineffective means for party reliance on illicit sources
(Nassmacher, 2009). Indeed, public financing systems often supplement,
rather than substitute, clientelistic forms of financing (Zovatto, 2003: 99).
As Melchionda noted, the moral thinking about political money usually
14 C. FIORELLI
perceives financial exchanges as a form of corruption. However, money is

not the object or the subject of political power; it is only its intermediary
(Melchionda, 1997: 9).
To sum up, political money constitutes an important resource for polit-
ical actors facing increasing, and expensive, political competition, but
despite the efforts of public intervention, money, particularly private
money, could form the basis of inequalities, distortions and disproportion
in representation and illicit attitudes. Taking political financing as a crucial
resource for the health of the party system and recognising the predomi-
nant role of public support, this project will attempt to cover the knowl-
edge gap regarding the private side of party revenues. An analysis of the
financial processes also allows an improved understanding of how repre-
sentative governments work because ‘the process of political finance con-
stitutes one set of mechanisms through which political representation is
achieved’ (Heard, 1960: 12).
2.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Private Money

in Politics
The financing of political parties has always attracted attention from social
scientists. Ostrogorski, Weber, Michels, Duverger, Neumann and
Kirchheimer all recognised the way parties acquire and spend money as an
important variable in understanding their organisation and behaviour (for
a review see Melchionda, 1997), but the recent predominance of state
funding, at least in the European context, has reduced the amount of
attention that is paid to the different monetary sources.
Typically, political finance refers to campaign finance in the United
States (US), while, in the European Union (EU), it refers to the funding
of political parties (Melchionda, 1997: 48). However, the lines are blur-
ring in terms of the political market. Nevertheless, political finance is usu-
ally an under-theorised aspect of political life (Scarrow, 2004). As van
Biezen (2010) noted, the nature of political financing regimes is contin-
gent upon various structural and institutional factors, such as the level of
democratisation, economic development, the presence of political scandals
and recognised corruption, types of party organisation and the electoral
system. However, all these factors usually explain very little of the existing
variation. According to Melchionda (1997), there are two extreme models
of private political financing: one in which a single big external donor has
the power, and one in which there are numerous small contributions and
the power is in the hands of those who control the fundraising process.
The sources of political money are important to understand different
aspects of a political system, such as interest representation, power distri-
bution, decision-making processes, electoral procedures, the party system
and political communication.
Nassmacher (2009) believed that different sources of income are divided
between grassroots revenues (membership fees or liberal donations from
members); plutocratic funding (large donations from firms, corporations
or important businesspersons); and public funding (direct or indirect
financial funds from the state). In addition, it is common to differentiate
between private self-financing and private external financing (von Beyme,
1985). The first category includes membership fees, parliamentary bene-
fits, investments, incomes from events and festivals and transfers from side
businesses and organisations. The latter refers to donations from external
individuals or corporations, kickbacks, illegal transfers from public busi-
nesses and indirect state help.
Once the source of money has been defined, we can turn to the defini-
tion of the strength of the financial relationship. The intensity of a dona-
tion can be understood as the influence of a donor over the political actor.
We can distinguish between weak, or soft, financing, which refers to con-
tributions to political parties that are made by elected politicians, forms of
subscriptions and indirect state funds, and strong, or hard, financing,
which refers to patrimonial donations from a party or members, consistent
external donors and direct state funds. Considering the intensity and level
of party institutionalisation, it is possible to identify four financing models:
liberal (low party institutionalisation and low intensity; plutocratic (low
institutionalisation, but high intensity); social-democratic (high institu-
tionalisation, but low intensity); and partitocratic (high institutionalisa-
tion and high intensity) (see Melchionda, 1997).
In addition, McMenamin (2013) stated that money can talk, and that
the language of money is either pragmatic or ideological. He believed that
pragmatic money usually corresponds to interested money, while ideologi-
cal money usually promotes the public good (McMenamin, 2012). He also
considered the structure of the economic system: in a liberal economy, it
is easier to find more pragmatic money, while in a co-ordinated economy
more ideological money is usually prevalent. Italy has a mixed type of
economy (Iversen, 2005; Soskice, 1999). As McMenamin noted, legal
instruments, such as ‘disclosure and public financing are likely to
16 C. FIORELLI
marginalise business financing of parties in co-ordinated economies, but

not always’ (McMenamin, 2013: 139).
From the theoretical point of view we may adopt to investigate political
financing, Nassmacher (2009) stated that the party organisational per-
spective focuses on the effects of party funding on party system and organ-
isation. However, due to the discretionary power of parties in deciding
their political financing rules, I invert the causal factors, thereby investi-
gating the political financing system as a phenomenon that is dependent
on party organisational models and the party system.
Therefore, relying on a new institutionalism perspective, we can
approach the study of political finance from three different and comple-
mentary angles. The first of these, rational choice institutionalism, views
actors as embedded in relationships that are considered to be useful in
maximising their preferences following a cost–benefit calculation, also
accounting for environmental constraints. The second, historical institu-
tionalism, focuses on the path dependence of institutional and organisa-
tional changes, and parties are viewed as historical entities. Last, but not
least, normative institutionalism emphasises the fact that individual actors
and organisations are embedded in a normative environment that provides
rules for the appropriate way of action (for a review see March & Olsen,
1984; Koß, 2011).
These three perspectives can be taken together to provide a more com-
prehensive understanding of political finance. Actors, be they parties, poli-
ticians or donors, can be considered to act according to a rational logic in
an environment in which relationships are established, maintained or dis-
missed on the basis of a perceived advantage. At the same time, parties as
organisations are considered to be historical entities, and their evolution
follows a historical path determined by both internal constraints, such as
previous choices, and external pressures. Political actors are also embed-
ded in a normative environment, political finance in a democratic system,
which provides a specific logic of appropriateness necessary to be consid-
ered a legitimate player (disclosure rules and transparency, limits of expen-
diture for electoral campaigns, limits on single donations, etc.).
Hopkin (2004) adopted a political economy perspective, whereby the
unit of analysis is the individual, and the political behaviour is assumed to
be rational, instrumental and self-interested. According to his perspective,
in order to face the spread of disinterested volunteers, parties will tend to
adopt different organisational strategies that correspond to four main
organisational party models, as follows: the clientelistic mass party, in
which state resources are exploited by the party in power to distribute

selective incentives; the externally financed elite party, where the political
elite strive to attract the bulk of the donations and keep the political power
in their hands; the self-financed elite party, in which notables and business-
persons run their own political campaigns without the need to seek exter-
nal contributions; and the cartel party, where the funds provided by the
public source of political financing keep parties safe and provide their sub-
sistence at large. Irrespective of whether Hopkin’s approach contributes to
a theoretical explanation of the changes occurring to the party model, it
does not consider the influence of external pressures and does not provide
a comprehensive understanding.
We must also consider party goals in order to understand the primary
will of parties. Party goals can be divided between an office-seeking party,
when the party tends to maximise its control over political office benefits,
a policy-seeking party, for which the determinant is its impact on public
policy, and a vote-seeking party, when the primary goal is to obtain greater
electoral support and the control of government (Müller & Strøm, 1999).
Party goals can change from time to time, as they are contingent and are
affected by the electoral system. In a first-past-the-post system, a party will
tend to adopt a vote-seeking perspective, due to the power of the electoral
moment in determining the ruling party, while in a proportional system,
parties prefer an office-seeking strategy due to the presence of more
veto points.
According to Scarrow (2004), an accepted idea among scholars of
political finance is that the finance regulations and reforms reflect the
interests of the party in power. Therefore, a revenue-maximising party will
be interested in increasing its income even beyond what is strictly required,
while an electoral-economy party’s perspective will lead to a focus on short-
term electoral success as its primary aim, and will subsequently pay more
attention to public opinion.
Beyond the theoretical framework of party funding, empirical research
has generally been focused on three different aspects of the effects that a
specific financing regime can have: effects on party system fragmentation
and petrification (Booth & Robbins, 2010; Pierre et al., 2000; Scarrow,
2006); effects on high volatility and a membership decrease (Casas-
Zamora, 2005; Whiteley, 2011); and effects on organisational develop-
ment (Casal Bértoa & Spirova, 2019; Nassmacher, 2009; Van Biezen,
2003). However, findings gathered using the aforementioned approaches
have been contested in several studies (see, e.g. Pierre et al., 2000): ‘party
18 C. FIORELLI
finances do not explain why party systems are as they are, nor their vari-
ance across the world’ (Sartori, 1976: 95). Thus, party finance should be
considered as a dependent phenomenon, rather than as an explanatory
variable for a party system. Inverting the explanatory factors by explaining
financing dynamics using institutional, organisational and party-based
dimensions could provide a different insight in this contested field.
In addition, the analysis of party funding could be informative to reveal
a party’s connections with civil society and the wellness of these relations,
especially with organised interests and other political organisations.
2.4 Linking Political Parties to Interest Groups

The study of the role and influence of political money usually places
emphasis on the donor’s motivation and looks at the consequences of
electoral contributions in terms of how they influence policymaking or
electoral results. This project adopted the party perspective with the aim
of understanding if the structural changes that occurred in the last decades
have modified the capacity of political parties to connect with civil society
and, if so, how parties have reacted. For this reason, the literature on
party–group studies is crucial. Linking donors to interest groups consti-
tutes an essential part in the financing relations with political parties: they
represent a theoretical shortcut to understanding donors’ major concerns,
allowing us to see the connection at stake, and, from the party perspective,
the network of relations they have with different interests present in civil
society.
Defining what is an interest group is not an easy task. In the literature
we can find different and overlapping definitions that link the concept of
interest group to the concept of party. As stated by Baumgartener and
Leech (1998), the lack of a common definition has hindered the accumu-
lation of knowledge in this field of studies. In order to avoid confusion, an
influential and broader definition is the one that describes interest groups
as an association of individuals or a corporate body, usually formally organ-
ised, that attempts to influence public policy, providing institutional link-
age between the state and the major interests in a given society (Thomas
& Hrebenar, 1999: 114; Wilson, 1990).
In this work, an even broader definition has been adopted in order to
include single corporations and firms, as well as individuals working in a
specific economic activity. The literature considered above provides evi-
dence of the increasing attention paid by scholars to the role of
money—especially Big Money—in politics and the importance of taking

into consideration the financing connections with firms and corporations
with political actors: ‘parties and firms are the collective actors of capital-
ism and representative democracy’ (Schattschneider, 1942: 1). Especially
in liberal democracies, political parties and interest groups are among the
most important institutions that define the character of the political sys-
tem, and serve as the principal links between the citizens and their govern-
ment (Thomas, 2001).
The interest group is different from the political party for three main
reasons: (1) the major goal of a political party is to win formal control of
government to implement its program, whereas an interest group does
not wish to win formal control of government but simply desires to influ-
ence public policy in its areas of concern; (2) parties have an avowedly
public purpose as broad coalitions that facilitate compromise and gover-
nance in a society as a whole, whereas interest groups have narrow con-
cerns that focus and aggregate their members’ interests and articulate
them to government; and (3) parties run candidates in elections, whereas
interest groups do not (Schattschneider, 1960; Almond & Powell, 1966;
Duverger, 1972). Usually, the stress of the difference is put on the respon-
siveness that political parties have in electoral competitions.
Parties typically rely on interest groups to provide votes from particular
constituencies, monetary support and organisational assistance, while
interest groups try to find alliances for legislation and policy rewards. The
influence of organised interests in the policymaking process can be divided
into three main categories: they can purchase votes with campaign contri-
butions; they can mobilise constituencies or report constituency prefer-
ences to the legislator, with an articulation of demands; or, most commonly,
they provide information or subsidise those in office: expertise.
Many researchers believe that groups provide a forum for people who
share a common attitude or an interest to come together and mobilise
their collective energy through political action (Thomas, 2001). As a
result, as a secondary association, the interest group leads to political
intermediation (Van Deth, 1997; Gunther et al., 2007). Unions and pro-
fessional societies, as Bellucci et al. (2007) pointed out, are much more
successful in serving as political intermediaries in terms of political engage-
ment. Secondary networks focused on conventional cleavages continue to
be more capable of encapsulating parts of the electorate than any other
civic association. Social cleavages in the political system are typically
expressed by and with the assistance of intermediary organisations (Easton,
20 C. FIORELLI
1965). As Aarts (1995) showed, the increase in material wealth has made
material inequalities less important, and the rise of new mass media has
challenged the role of social organisations, especially the role of political
parties as gatekeepers. However, even if the political linkages have declined
as a consequence of long-term developments, there is no evidence for a
general decline in individual linkages to intermediary systems. Instead,
more and more people seem to regard themselves to be represented more
by interest groups than by political parties (see Wessels, 1997). The pres-
ence of organised interest groups can, thus, be seen as a contribution to
the democratic process but can also represent a threat to it (Dahl, 1961;
Pizzorno, 1980); what matters is the relevance they have in a society and
their capacity to influence the policymaking process.
To be representative, an interest group must be rooted in a political
structure as an external intermediary actor whose validity is based on the
system’s recognition of its identity. Access to the political system through
organised interests is contingent upon the group’s social reputation; its
membership; and the existence of authoritative leaders, expertise, and
structural factors such as institutional limitations, policymaking traditions,
and political system characteristics (Morlino, 1998). These factors con-
tribute to the formation of the fundamental distinction between insider
and outsider groups: the former are those recognised by the political sys-
tem as political interlocutors; the latter typically operate outside of institu-
tions and by indirect lobbying (Grant, 2005).
The main literature on interest group studies proposes different cate-
gorisation based on the nature and/or the aims a group pursues. Classical
categorisation divides groups into special interest groups, public interest
groups and promotional groups (see Schattschneider, 1960; Salisbury,
1975; Berry, 1977). The same categories have been used by many schol-
ars, with some variation. For instance, groups may be classified in terms of
whether they are sectional or economic, including business and profes-
sional associations, and trade unions; promotional, including cultural, sci-
entific or issue-based associations; and institutional, including universities,
churches, bureaucracies and local institutions. Schlozman (2010) identi-
fied six macro-categories of groups that describe the American pressure
system: economic organisations, labour unions, identity groups, public
interest groups, state and local government and other organisations. A
more recent categorisation, defined by Binderkrantz (2012), is based on
‘reasonable categories’ to look at the relevance of a group on the political
scene, and identifies five macro-categories: labour unions, business groups,
groups of institutions and authorities, other economic sectional groups

and public interest groups.
In terms of broader perspectives, research in this area has typically taken
one of three approaches: corporatist, pluralist, or elitist (Yishai, 1991).
Since the emergence of group studies in the US, pluralist and neo-pluralist
approaches have garnered considerable interest in the literature (see
Bentley, 1908; Truman, 1951). This school of thought believed that no
single interest group dominated specific policy domains, but rather that a
plurality of actors competed or cooperated in these arenas (see Berry,
1984; Bosso, 1987). This perception contrasted with the elitist belief that
special interests dominated particular policy arenas (Olson, 1965;
Lowi, 1969).
Due to the rise of social pacts among European countries in the 1970s,
European scholars were far more drawn to corporatist and neo-corporatist
perspectives (see Lehmbruch & Schmitter, 1982; Crouch, 1993). Wessels
(1996) claims that organised business is stronger in countries with a cor-
poratist history, such as Northern European countries, Germany, Austria
and the Netherlands. In Italy, the organised business sector appears to be
divided and limited in its ability to exert direct pressure control. The same
pattern is recognisable for trade unions, which are powerful in corporatist
countries and highly fragmented elsewhere, as in Italy, France and Spain.
Regardless of the dominant theoretical viewpoint used in the past,
interest group studies seem to be convergent now (Mahoney &
Baumgartener, 2008). Previously, European scholars were more con-
cerned with policy framework dynamics, while US scholars were more
concerned with lobbying activities. Both seem to be focusing on the effect
of government processes on the growth of national interest systems at the
moment. However, the aforementioned studies viewed political parties
and interest groups as two independent actors, concentrating on one side
or the other, or as alternate intermediaries (Dalton, 2002), emphasising
functional differences (Beyers et al., 2008) or their association with gov-
erning parties, rather than political parties in general.
Political parties and interest groups are intricately and inextricably
related: they co-evolve; monitor each other; contribute to shaping politi-
cal identities; and form societal and political networks between them
(Heaney, 2010).
Several scholars have tried to assess the importance and the relation-
ships among lobbies, interest groups and political parties, considering
their roles for the articulation of specific interests (Baumgartener & Leech,
22 C. FIORELLI
1998; Lehmbruch, 1977; Schattschneider, 1948), but many of these stud-

ies lack the ability to connect the three actors with each other. In recent
years, after the downfall of the corporatist model, more attention has been
put on the political parties’ side, and scholars are increasingly attracted to
this topic.1 From the party’s perspective, scholars usually emphasise the
incentives and strategies of political parties to explain party–group interac-
tions (see Allern, 2010; Allern & Bale, 2012; Schwartz, 2005; Verge, 2013).
In his comparative research, Thomas (2001) has found that the varia-
tion in party–group relationships in different political systems can be
explained by structural factors such as the presence of strong ideologies
that increase the power of the interactions; strong parties, which can
favour particular groups; and a strong party system, in terms of discipline,
that can control the agenda.
The relations among political parties and interest groups vary across
time and context. In the literature, until the end of the 1990s, five types
of party–group relations were recognised: pluralist; (neo)corporatist; par-
tisan, when the party dominates over the groups; responsible party, when
access is not based on party alliances; and determinant, used more by
American scholars (Thomas, 2001).
The bulk of the—so far—small amount of literature that does not con-
sider groups and political parties as two autonomous actors focuses on
party–group competition and its consequences (see Thomas, 2001).
Scholars agree that we need a more systematic view of the relationships
between political parties and interest groups because these two actors can
shape the nature of contemporary democracy (Allern & Bale, 2012). In
fact, various recent works point to reconstructing the party–group rela-
tions in the existing literature (see Allern & Bale, 2012; Lisi & Oliveira,
2020); clarifying the conceptualisation and measurement of party–group
links (see Allern & Verge, 2017; Allern et al., 2020); and putting emphasis
on the need for a more unified view in party–group research (see Fraussen
& Halpin, 2018; Lisi & Oliveira, 2020; Berkhout et al., 2021). The lively
theoretical debate on party–group relations is continuously evolving.
The political financing perspective can help us to fill the gap on specific
kind of relations, strategies adopted by actors and interest at stake. There
is great attention on groups’ involvement in the US literature (see Berry,
1984; Wright, 1990; Cox, 1997; Boatright, 2018). In the US, direct or
indirect contributions to parties and candidates during the electoral cam-
paign can be considered a bond between the actors involved. In the EU,
only a few studies have addressed this topic (see Farrell & Schmitt-Beck,
2008; Binderkrantz, 2008; Murphy, 2012; Binderkrantz, 2015). However,

the electoral involvement of interest groups through campaign donations
to political parties and/or candidates has been recognised to be a form of
partisan engagement for groups—at a low level (Binderkrantz, 2015:
121)—and a kind of indirect contact to be investigated (see Thomas,
2001; Allern et al., 2020).
Note
1. See for instance Allern (2010), or the special issue of Party Politics,
2012, 18(7).
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CHAPTER 3
Private Political Financing: Between

Regulations and In-depth Research
Abstract In both comparative and country-specific studies on private

money in politics, a knowledge gap is recognised. I address the state-of-
the-art of studies in this area in this chapter, focusing on the regulatory
framework and international debate. To comprehend dynamics, an in-
depth study is required; hence, the case of Italy is viewed from this vantage
point. The political transitions that have occurred there over the last few
decades underscore the transformations that have arisen in a number of
developing countries. Progressive alienation of political parties from civil
society, as well as the personalisation of electoral competition, can be ana-
lysed by the flow of money raised by political groups, allowing us to gain
a greater understanding of political actors’ shifting representational roles
and financial networks.
Keywords Financing regime • Empirical research • Private political

money • Italian case
3.1 Political Financing Regimes

When attempting to understand the dynamics related to private political
money, the regulatory regimes governing political financing cannot be
omitted from consideration. As I mentioned previously, the effort to avoid

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73869-3_3
32 C. FIORELLI
the temptation of illegal practices has led many countries to introduce

some form of public funding (see Koß, 2011; Pinto-Duschinsky, 2002;
Scarrow, 2007).
In previously published comparative studies, three different regulatory
trajectories concerning political finance may commonly be distinguished:
the laissez-faire way, where state intervention, as well as public financial
help, is very limited; the private funding model, in which political actors
can rely primarily or exclusively on private money; and the public funding
alternative, where state subsidies are vital for the subsistence of parties
and/or candidates (see Ewing & Issacharoff, 2006). According to Ewing
and Issacharoff, ‘the financing questions cannot be addressed indepen-
dently of the constitutional conventions of the country, the nature of the
political parties in the country, and the means of access to publications and
media in any given nation’ (Ewing & Issacharoff, 2006: 2). For example,
if we examine the fundamental historical vision behind state organisation
and political party regimes in the United States (US) and the United
Kingdom (UK), in the former country parties are considered to be highly
attracted by the concept of liberty, whereas in the latter country they are
more concerned with having solid societal bases as a party’s grassroots, for
example, as for the Labour Party with the unions. Therefore, the political
and societal arrangements in those countries, despite their numerous simi-
larities, should be considered different. The funding regime is a depen-
dent variable, a combination of causal factors that are also related to party
competition and a subgroup of the institutional regimes (Koß, 2011).
Despite the differences and meanings that a political financing regime
assumes in a specific country, the empirical evidence suggests that, from a
regulatory perspective, there has been a convergence of party-funding
regimes: 83 of 143 countries ranked as free have introduced a form of
state subsidy for political parties and/or political candidates (see Koß,
2011; Nassmacher, 2009). The political financing regime is usually defined
by three different dimensions: the source of income, the areas of spending
that are permitted or limited, and disclosure and transparency rules and
controls (see Casas-Zamora, 2005; Koß, 2011; Nassmacher, 2009).
A brief overview on political financial regimes can be useful. The com-
plete absence of direct state funds (DSF) is more widespread among the
American countries—see, for example, Bolivia, Jamaica and Venezuela—
while in Europe a completely private form of political financing is recog-
nised only in Belarus, Malta and Switzerland, that is, three of 44 countries.
Many countries in Europe provide DSF on a regular basis, such as Ireland,
3 PRIVATE POLITICAL FINANCING: BETWEEN REGULATIONS… 33
Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Romania and Russia; in the

Americas, this is applicable only to Brazil, Peru, Barbados, Guatemala and
the Dominican Republic. The most widespread financing regime is one
that provides subsidies for both the regular activities of political parties
and electoral expenses. This is true in Europe, where it applies to almost
half of the countries (e.g., in Germany, Spain, France and the UK, where
only the opposition party receives DSF), and in the Americas, where more
than 26% of the countries are included (e.g., Argentina, Chile and Mexico).
DSF are provided only for election reimbursements in Canada, the US
(only for presidential elections and only in the case that a presidential can-
didate refuses to collect private donations), Monaco and Italy (until 2013).
Of course, the criteria to be met in order to access the public subsidies can
differentiate among states: they usually consider the public support of a
political actor, in terms of the number of parliamentary seats attained, the
proportion of electoral support or both, but they can also be based on the
ability of a political party/candidate to raise private (voluntary) money,
such as with the matching funds mechanism in Germany or the US.
Indirect state financing relates to all the money that is provided not
directly by the state, but via other mechanisms, such as tax relief, free
media access, publication support or free travel, which correspond to less
income for the state. These types of financial help are fairly common
among all democracies, being provided in half of the countries in Europe
and the Americas, guaranteeing tax relief for private donors and providing
free access to the media, particularly access to TV and advertising.
The idea behind the introduction of limitations in the amount to be
received or expended is to avoid the influence of private donors, on the
one hand, and to guarantee fair competition, on the other. However,
while limits on political parties and/or candidates appear to be a fairly
normal habit among European countries, in half of these countries parties
and candidates are constrained in their expenditures, and they are less
frequently applied in the Americas, where only 26.5% of countries limit
the expenditure of political parties.
The control mechanisms adopted to regulate the income and expendi-
ture of political actors are considerably varied across the countries anal-
ysed. Assessments made by different political/independent
agencies—courts, committees and ministers—are largely considered use-
ful in order to introduce some form of accountability to the system (see
O’Donnell, 1996). European countries strive to be stricter in this respect.
Almost all of the political parties must report their financial accounts, with
34 C. FIORELLI
the exception of Belarus, Monaco and Switzerland, but this is required in

only half of the countries in the Americas; candidates in 53% of countries
in the Americas do not provide financial reports, but 77% of countries in
Europe provide such reports—the exceptions are the Czech Republic,
Monaco, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
Publication of party/candidate reports is common among European
countries, while, again, this is required in only half of American countries.
However, even if public support of political competition has reached a
large scale, differences emerge among countries, and the analysis of a spe-
cific financial regime should focus on in-depth research into the dynamics
involved.
3.2 Private Political Financing

in Comparative Perspective
The questions regarding the role of private money in politics that arose in
Chap. 2 should be addressed from a comparative perspective, ensuring
that they consider specific country-based dynamics. Unfortunately, scien-
tific knowledge in this field is limited, primarily as a result of difficulties
related to the availability of data and to transparency rules.1 Therefore,
with regard to the public funding regimes of political actors, the study of
the private financing of politics and political competition is generally based
on regulations (see Koß, 2011; Melchionda, 1997; Nassmacher, 2009).
Table 3.1 presents an overview of the regulation of private financing in
different democracies, which have been selected to provide cases of differ-
ent political financing regimes (see Koß, 2011). Canada, the US and the
UK are based on low-value public funding, while France, Germany, Italy,2
Spain and Sweden provide high-value subsidies. Switzerland represents a
completely private model.
In the comparative study of private funding regulations, we can recog-
nise three main dimensions that help to qualify different regimes: the pres-
ence of forbidden donations, particularly those coming from corporate
businesses, unions, foreign interests and anonymous donors; limitations,
which are applied to preserve fair competition among political parties and
candidates and to avoid external influences, if applied to a donor’s ability
to contribute; and the existence of mechanisms of control and account-
ability that correspond to the political actors’ obligation to report their
revenues and to disclose the identity of donors.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
have a private opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his
fitness.
Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with
Carlyle’s studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in
Dumfriesshire,[20] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr.
Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the
Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was
settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in
Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new
duties, picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the
valley of the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend,
Frank Dickson, in his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly
described in the Reminiscences.
Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming
acquaintance with Dr. Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly
knew what to make of him,—some thinking him more like a “cavalry
officer” or “brigand chief” than a young minister of the Gospel,—
Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His uncertainties and speculations as
to his future, with the dream of emigration to America, had turned
themselves into a vague notion that, if he gave himself to the study of
law, he might possibly be able to muster somehow the two or three
hundreds of pounds that would be necessary to make him a member
of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for walking up and down the
floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown, like the grandees he
had seen there in his memorable first visit to the place, with Tom
Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in Edinburgh was
essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings now seem to
be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo Street,—possibly in the
rooms which Irving had left.
No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with
our University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law
studies after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his
own, quoted by Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears
that he attended “Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude
adds that his intention of becoming an advocate, and his consequent
perseverance in attendance on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh
University, continued for some time. Our records, however, are not
quite clear in the matter. In our Matriculation Book for the session
1819–20, where every law student, as well as every arts student and
every medical student, was bound to enter his name, paying a
matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas Carlyles, both from
Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and elegant hand, I
should take to be that of our Carlyle at that date, enters himself as
“Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5 Lit.,” signifying
that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in four preceding
sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle is 825.
The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself, in a
somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,”
with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one
previous session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the
construction of the appearances of those two Carlyles in the
independent class-lists that have been preserved, in the handwritings
of the Professors, for that session of their common matriculation and
for subsequent sessions. Without troubling the reader with the
puzzling details, I may say that the records present an alternative of
two suppositions: viz. either (1) Both the Thomas Carlyles who
matriculated for 1819–20 became law students that session; in which
case the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too
boyish-looking handwriting, and the gross misdescription of him as
“2 Lit.,” was our Carlyle; or (2) Only one of the two became a law
student; in which case he was the “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or
our Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the name of his county, and
correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the first supposition it has
to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance in a law class was in the
Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for the session 1819–20,
while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class for “the Institutes”
that session, but reappeared in other classes in later sessions. On the
second supposition (which also involves a mistake in the
registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the
“Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so
began a new career of attendance in the University, which extended
to 1823 thus:—
Session 1819–20: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor
Alexander Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
Session 1820–21: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s
Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his
vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
Session 1821–22: No attendance.
Session 1822–23: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new
Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819
contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact,
though a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of
time over which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to
his Edinburgh life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He
was not, indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides
absences now and then on brief visits, e.g. to Irving in Glasgow or
elsewhere in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations,
longer or shorter, in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at
Mainhill in Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in
country quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the
proper date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an
Edinburgh man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but
afterwards and more continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of
course, the great Moray Place of the aristocratic West End, but a
much obscurer namesake, now re-christened “Spey Street,” at right
angles to Pilrig Street, just off Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings
that he read and mused; it was in the streets of Edinburgh, or on the
heights on her skirts, that he had his daily walks; the few friends and
acquaintances he had any converse with were in Edinburgh; and it
was with Edinburgh and her affairs that as yet he considered his own
future fortunes as all but certain to be bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of
Edinburgh, or of any other city, than the Carlyle of those years.
Those great natural faculties, unmistakably of the order called
genius, and that unusual wealth of acquirement, which had been
recognised in him as early as 1814 by such intimate friends as
Murray, and more lately almost with awe by Margaret Gordon, had
been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still manifest to the
discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of them, it is with
a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange moodiness of
character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness and
unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and
others had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened
themselves into settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word
“habit” is misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word
pass in the meantime for a state of temper which it would take many
words, and some of them much softer and grander, to describe
adequately, was an innate and constitutional distinction. It is worth
while to dwell for a moment on the contrast between him in this
respect and the man who was his immediate predecessor in the
series of really great literary Scotsmen. If there ever was a soul of
sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good
fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world.
When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the
Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been
amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the
opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly
endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal
peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of
pain. From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own
mother said of him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to
deal with”), the prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and
bitter broodings, addicted to the black and dismal view of things.
With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his
strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of
the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess
of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature
years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His
despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. A
few authentications may be quoted:—
April, 1819.—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several accounts, that I
can give no satisfactory account to your friendly inquiries. A good portion of my
life is already mingled with the past eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene,
on which my eyes are fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose.
The probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is certainly not
very strong.”[22]
March, 1820.—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble, weak,
yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely unfit to force my
way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this planet. Law, I fear, must be given
up: it is a shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane.”[23]
October, 1820.—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the next
scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last. Expect no account of
my prospects, for I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being
thrown from another planet on this terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its
possessors; I have no share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste
and howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under dark-
brown shade.”[24]
March 9, 1821.—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me.
In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from a far-distant land. I
must endeavour most sternly, for this state of things cannot last; and, if health do
but revisit me, as I know she will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow
seriously ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is settled and
dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am considerably clearer than I
was, and I should have been still more so had not this afternoon been wet, and so
prevented me from breathing the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us,
where the atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any
you ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling
gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and precipices at our feet, where
not a hillock rears its head unsung; with Edinburgh at their base, clustering
proudly over her rugged foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the
jagged, black, venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show
like a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down,
and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly
above me.”[25]
Reminiscence in 1867.—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce resolution in
abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways, and to suffer as silently
and stoically as might be, if it proved (as too likely!) that I could do nothing. This
kind of humour, what I sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended
me all my life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing towards
huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh
purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for
several years coming, the first and much the worst two or three of which were to be
enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness
of spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his
seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto
had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which
he could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return
to; he had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual
poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as
it was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in
honourable employments, which many of his compeers in age would
have been glad to get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his
pocket,—a sum larger than the majority of the educated young
Scotsmen about him could then finger, or perhaps ever fingered
afterwards in all their lives. All this has to be distinctly remembered;
for the English interpretations of Carlyle’s early “poverty,”
“hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the Scottish standard of his
time, by the standard of say two-thirds of those who had been his
fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh, Carlyle’s circumstances so
far had been even enviable. The cause of his abnormal unhappiness
was to be found in himself. Was it, then, his ill-health,—that fearful
“dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his twenty-third year, or
just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh, and which clung to
him, as we know, to the very end of his days? There can be no doubt
that this was a most important factor in the case. His dyspepsia must
have intensified his gloom, and may have accounted for those
occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged on hypochondria.
But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought along with him
from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as he told the
blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy and
hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet
become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement
called a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he
denounced the Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal
fellows for their persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn
in the flesh,” as if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a
spiritual kind, the mere pathological explanations which physicians
are apt to trust to will not suffice in such instances. What, then, of
those spiritual distresses, arising from a snapping of the traditional
and paternal creed, and a soul left thus rudderless for the moment,
which Luther recognised as the most terrible, and had experienced in
such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of
himself away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father
and mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that
his clear intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the
theology from which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The
main evidence is that, though he had some central core of faith still
to seek as a substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a
new way the old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, Num detur
Religio Naturalis?, and had not yet attained to that light, describable
as a fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or
Supernaturalism, in the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,
—yet he was not involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and
“backward hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so
cantingly, in feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in
his case of any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a
theosophic refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy.
On the contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of
moral or really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have
settled once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the
limits of the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human
intellect in that class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may
suggest itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent
and imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those
love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a
masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we
may well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a
while by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost
Margaret Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have
their due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the
main and all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in
those Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a
scabbard, a noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies
and ambitions measuring itself against common souls and against
social obstructions, and all but frantic for lack of employment.
Schoolmastering he had given up with detestation; the Church he
had given up with indifference; the Law had begun to disgust him, or
was seeming problematical. Where others could have rested, happy
in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle could not. What was this
Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which he was living, the
solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on speaking terms with
those that were considered her magnates, the very best of whom he
was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary, to vanquish
and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant glare round
Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this innocent
and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the throat
and compel to listen.
Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some
elucidation with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel
for conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a
correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive
atmosphere, not of vulgar mauvaise honte, though such it is
generally esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit
from nature, and which are mostly due to the undefined station I
have hitherto occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in
March 1820, “The fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the
grand whole in this best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,
—with just one observation more, which I throw out for your benefit,
should you ever come to need such an advice. It is to keep the
profession you have adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man
who goes forth into the world to seek his fortune with those lofty
ideas of honour and uprightness which a studious secluded life
naturally begets, will in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if
friends and other aids are wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow
leaf.”[29] These feelings were known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s
despondency over his poor social prospects, his enormous power of
complaint, or, as the Scots call it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar
a topic with them as with his own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more
encouragingly to him than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some
of Irving’s letters that we gather the information that certain
peculiarities in Carlyle’s own demeanour were understood to be
operating against his popularity even within the limited Edinburgh
circle in which he did for the present move. “Known you must be
before you can be employed,” Irving writes to him in December 1819.
“Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a winning, attaching,
accommodating man, but for an original, commanding, and rather
self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most favourable. It
convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very few (I can
claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is worse.
They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical, unthinking
drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and who give
you little justice in the recital, because you give their vanity or self-
esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter. Therefore, my
dear friend, some other way is to be sought for.”[30] In a letter in
March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is, my dear
Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts of your
mind, and to try to present the society about you with those more
ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which
they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the
ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall
and wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the
possession of your treasures, and to study more the times and
persons to which you bring them forth. When I say your treasures, I
mean not your information so much, which they will bear the display
of for the reward and value of it, but your feelings and affections;
which, being of finer tone than theirs, and consequently seeking a
keener expression, they are apt to mistake for a rebuke of their own
tameness, or for intolerance of ordinary things, and too many of
them, I fear, for asperity of mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s
advice over again; and it enables us to add to our conception of
Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh struggling and obstruction the
fact of his fearlessness and aggressiveness in speech, his habit even
then of that lightning rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with
sarcasms and stinging contempts falling mercilessly upon his
auditors themselves, which characterised his conversation to the last.
This habit, or some of the forms of it, he had derived, he thought,
from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s
most immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of
the kind at his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day,
and also of one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away
from Edinburgh. Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the
higher mathematics. My recollection is that he used to connect the
break-down of his health with his continued wrestlings with
Newton’s Principia even after he had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh;
and he would speak of the grassy slopes of the Castle Hill, then not
railed off from Princes Street, as a place where he liked to lie in fine
weather, poring over that or other books. His readings, however,
were now, as before, very miscellaneous. The Advocates’ Library, to
which he had access, I suppose, through some lawyer of his
acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books such as he
had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to it, alone of Scottish
institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this Library;
and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may judge
from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When I
am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which
solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable
little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s
repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take
them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just
after settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was
the study of the German language. French, so far as the power of
reading it was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his
boyhood; Italian, to some less extent, had come easily enough; but
German tasked his perseverance and required time. He was
especially diligent in it through the years 1819 and 1820, with such a
measure of success that in August in the latter year he could write to
one friend, “I could tell you much about the new Heaven and new
Earth which a slight study of German literature has revealed to me,”
and in October of the same year to another, “I have lived riotously
with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest: they are the greatest men at
present with me.” His German readings were continued, and his
admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in
Literature himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—
the very vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray,
had discerned his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to
which the failure of his successive experiments in established
professions had ever since been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had
been most importunately urging him in those letters, just quoted, in
which, after telling him that, by reason of the asperity and irritating
contemptuousness of his manner, he would never be rightly
appreciated by his usual appearances in society, or even by his
splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his advice in the words
“Some other way is to be sought for.” What Irving meant, and urged
at some length, and with great practicality, in those letters, was that
Carlyle should at once think of some literary attempts, congenial to
his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as possible, and aim at a
connection with the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while,
turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly
impossible that a young man who for five years already had been
writing letters to his friends the English style of which moved them
to astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read
the specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have
been exercising his literary powers privately in other things than
letters, and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of
pieces suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such
piece, he tells us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the
editor of some magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the
descriptive tourist kind,” giving some account of Carlyle’s first
impressions of the Yarrow country, so famous in Scottish song and
legend, as visited by him in one of his journeys from Edinburgh to
Annandale. What became of it he never knew, the editor having
returned no answer.[33] Although, after this rebuff, there was no new
attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there can be little doubt that
he had then a few other things by him, and not in prose only, with
which he could have repeated the trial. It is very possible that several
specimens of those earliest attempts of his in prose and verse,
published by himself afterwards when periodicals were open to him,
remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but two have
come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published
anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title
“Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story,” but
certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own
information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended
for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its
picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life.
It is entitled “Peter Nimmo,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine
for February 1831, the next number after that containing Cruthers
and Jonson.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was
known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being
called Peter Nimmo, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him,
Sir Peter Nimmo. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking
object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched,
and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long,
threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending
the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had
this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter
Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and
perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of
the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-
room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had
passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder,
steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to
reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get
rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and
the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to
the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already
in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr.
Hill Burton wrote of his first session at the University, viz. in 1830–
31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an
important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit
himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant
grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s
description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of
his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and
stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as
a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better
than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He
used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses,
sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students
got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him
with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s
company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about,
introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he
had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name
for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to
Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had
afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in
appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had
ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though thus familiar with
“Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his real standing by
his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly, he had at one
time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced him in the
University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s knowledge
of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking out
one or two classes. In the Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler, a small
satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session 1823–
24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the matter
consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous
notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man,
whose abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze
forth, and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in
Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the
Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical
classes, having entered himself in the matriculation book, in
conspicuously large characters, as “Petrus Buchanan Nimmo,
Esquire, &c., Dumbartonshire,” with the addition that he was in
the 17th year of his theological studies. Six years previously, viz. in
1813–14, he is registered as in the 8th year of his literary course. In
1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s fellow-students in the 2d
Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in 1810–11 he was with Carlyle
in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in the Logic Class. Peter seems
to have been lax in his dates; but there can be no doubt that he was a
known figure about Edinburgh University before Carlyle entered it,
and that the whole of Carlyle’s University career, as of the careers of
all the students of Edinburgh University for another generation, was
spent in an atmosphere of Peter Nimmo. What Peter had been
originally it is difficult to make out. The probability is that he had
come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid youth from
Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he had
gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could
not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture
about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for
the theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the
essential portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical
“Rhapsody,” consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and
an epilogue. In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “Numeris
fertur lege solutis,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the
solitary bard in quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?
Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;
Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.
Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,
And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?
Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?
If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.
For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, Peter Nimmo:
Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!
In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and

appearance:—
Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,
Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,
To and from that everlasting College-gate,
With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?
Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is
really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the
college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second
part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A
summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country
neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the
vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:
Here was he (words of import strange),—He here!
Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:
But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.
Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has

come, and on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the
sight of the little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the
donkey canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His
transition from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the
third part sings of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the
fourth part he is the poor mendicant Peter who has become the
Wandering Jew of the University, and whose mode of living is a
problem:—
Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,
This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;
He spins not, neither does he toil;
Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but
sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part
of the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we
must hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
At midnight hour did Peter come;
Right well I knew his tap and tread;
With smiles I placed two pints of rum
Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.
Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy
of his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great
prospects of various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s
head reduced to a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is
sent off in a wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather
indistinctly in three stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:
Life’s a variorum.
Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not

Carlyle’s element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse
altogether, and was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated,
which one would not willingly let die, it had been to prose
performances that he looked forward when, on bidding farewell to
Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for the booksellers” among the
employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh. Scientific subjects
had seemed the most promising: and among the books before him in
“those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were materials for a
projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s letter of
December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the
Edinburgh Review, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of
Gravitation, of which we hear in the Reminiscences. The manuscript,
carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very
legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great
Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject
was not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or
because editors are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing
more was heard of it.
This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance,
Carlyle might have languished without literary employment of any
kind for a good while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David
Brewster, afterwards Sir David. The Edinburgh Encyclopædia,
which Brewster had begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his
twenty-ninth year, and which had been intended to be in twelve
volumes, thick quarto, double-columns, had now, in 1820, reached
its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther than the letter M.
Among the contributors had been, or were, these: Babbage,
Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel, Dionysius
Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and
other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as
Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir
Thomas Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor
Dunbar, the Rev. Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon,
David Irving, Professor Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor
Leslie, and the Rev. Dr. Andrew Thomson. This was very good
company in which to make a literary début, were it only in such
articles of hackwork as might be intrusted conveniently to an
unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted to Carlyle
were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in just as the
poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles continuing
the line of some of Campbell’s. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore,
were his first six, all under the letter M, and all supplied in 1820,
with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823
he was to contribute ten more, running through the letter N, and
ending in the sixteenth volume, under the letter P, with Mungo Park,
William Pitt the Elder, and William Pitt the Younger. It was no bad
practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have
brought him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to
something more for casual bits of translation done for Brewster.
More agreeable to himself, and better paid in proportion, may have
been two articles which he contributed to the New Edinburgh
Review, a quarterly which was started in July 1821, by Waugh and
Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the previous Edinburgh
Monthly Review, and which came to an end, as might have been
predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823. In the
second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an
article of 21 pages by Carlyle on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends,
to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages
on Goethe’s Faust.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no
improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was
all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment
and impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest
approaches to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of
Irving, whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn
meetings and strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in
Irving’s visits now and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the
westward excursions, when the two friends were on Drumclog Moss,
and were talking together in the open air on that battle-field of the
Covenanters, that the good Irving wound from Carlyle the confession
that he no longer thought as Irving did of the Christian Religion. This
was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to
Edinburgh, in June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to
Haddington, and introduced him, at the house of the widowed Mrs.
Welsh, to that lady’s only child, Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former
pupil, and thought of by him as not impossibly to be his wife even
yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement interfered, she was not quite
twenty years of age, but the most remarkable girl in all that
neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form, features pretty rather
than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale, black hair over a
finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant black eyes, she had
an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or culture, to be the
feminine match of either of the two men that now stood before her.
——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the wife of
Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as she
appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse, the
now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at
Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh,
she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The
address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on
the dense slope down from the University to the back of the
Canongate; and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old
Haddington nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not
quite so old as I had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she
talked of her recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and
these, as near as possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was
young, she was a fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh,
that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There
was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he cam
aboot her. Then there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then
there was Maister Carlyle himsel’; and he cam to finish her off, like.
I’m told he’s a great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in
London.”——That was certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there
stood before the graceful and spirited girl in Haddington not only the
gigantic, handsome, black-haired Irving, whom she had known since
her childhood, but also the friend he had brought with him,—less tall
than Irving, of leaner and less handsome frame, but with head of the
most powerful shape, thick dark-brown hair several shades lighter
than her own, and an intenser genius than Irving’s visible in his deep
eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about
this time that Irving used to rattle up his friend from his desponding
depths by the prophecy of the coming time when they would shake
hands across a brook as respectively first in British Divinity and in
British Literature, and when people, after saying “Both these fellows
are from Annandale,” would add “Where is Annandale?” The girl,
looking at the two, may have already been thinking of Irving’s jocular
prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to
Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude
to a memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the
Sartor Resartus.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has
deserted the popular faith, passes through three stages before he
attains to complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in
the state of mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves
on to a middle point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally
he reaches “The Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question
is that in which, having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting
No,” the prey of the most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly
helpless and abject, there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry
day, as he was toiling along the wretched little street in Paris called
Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer, a kind of miraculous rousing and
illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What art thou
afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go
cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that
lies before thee? Death? Well, death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that
the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst
thou not suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast, trample
Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet
it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my
whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown
strength; a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim fire-eyed
Defiance. Thus had the Everlasting No (das Ewige Nein) pealed authoritatively
through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me
stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest.
Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No
had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the
Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for
ever hate thee!’ It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or
Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he
declares that, while most of Sartor Resartus is mere symbolical
myth, this account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the
imaginary Teufelsdröckh in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is
a record of what happened literally to himself one day in Leith Walk,
Edinburgh. He remembered the incident well, he says in the
memorandum, and the very spot in Leith Walk where it occurred.
The memorandum itself does not date the incident; but Mr. Froude,
from authority in his possession, dates it in June 1821. As that was
the month of the first visit to Haddington, and first sight of Jane
Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever was the amount of
change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his recollection of the
Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an exaggeration to say, as
Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of Carlyle’s complete
“conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense that he then
“achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative, by which the
whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place, we have
Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his Reminiscences that his
complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of finding
that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings,
fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-
gods,” and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the
eternal blue of Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years
after the present date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam
Hill between 26th May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place,
it would be a mistake to suppose that the spiritual change which
Carlyle intended to describe, whether in his own case or in
Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from the “Everlasting No,” through
the “Centre of Indifference,” to the “Everlasting Yes,” was a change of
intellectual theory in relation to any system of theological doctrine.
The parting from the old theology, in the real case as well as in the
imaginary one, had been complete; and, though there had been a
continued prosecution of the question as to the possibility of a
Natural Religion, the form in which that question had been
prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between
Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual
Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of
personal duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the
universe” which Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith
was the spiritualistic one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative
hypothesis of a struggle between the Divine and the Diabolic, can
hardly be doubted. No constitution such as his could have adopted
the other theory, or rested in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have
been adopted however passionately and held however tenaciously,
what a tumult of mind, what a host of despairs and questionings,
before its high abstractions could be brought down into a rule for
personal behaviour, and wrapt with any certainty or comfort round
one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How was that vast
Inconceivable related to this little life and its world; or was there no
relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible power? What of
the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man amid them?
What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental groping
and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general
assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken
account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description
is that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so
much on an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the

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Political Party Funding and Private

Donations in Italy 1st Edition Fiorelli

The Government Party Political Dominance in Democracy

Right Radicalism in Party and Political Systems in

The New Political Economy of Disability Transnational

The Academy of Fisticuffs Political Economy and

Higher Education Funding and Access in International

Safe as houses: Private greed, political negligence and

Target Funding 1st Edition Kedma Ough

Party Mergers in Myanmar 1st Edition Thant

Political Party Funding

More information about this series at

Interest Groups, Advocacy and Democracy Series

Cover image: © ehui1979 / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Image

1 Introduction: The Informative Power of Private Political

2 Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Political

3 Private Political Financing: Between Regulations and

4 The Connective Capability of Italian Political Parties 57

5 The Donor’s Dilemma: External Donations Between Party

6 The Financial Appeal of Political Parties: Looking for the

7 Conclusion: Winter Is Coming and Political Parties Will

ADP Movimento per l’Autonomia Democratici Progressisti

PSI Partito Socialista Italiano

Fig. 5.1 Distribution of number of external donations collected by

Table 3.1 Regulation on Private Political Financing in Different

Table 5.6 Distribution of External Donations According to the

Introduction: The Informative Power

Keywords Political financing • Private donations • Political parties •

Without a doubt, significant changes in the way politics operates have

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

most powerful collective players, owing to their direct access to public

parties that are increasingly oriented to a market economy of electoral

actors than on the magnitude of private financing, as well as the networks

chapter is to explore and compare the potential of Italian political parties

mattered—and time. Naturally, this work originates in my head. I am

Challenges and Perspectives in the Study

Abstract Democratic party transformations are a central topic of research

Keywords Cartel party • Political financing • Private money • Party–

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 7

2.1 The Contemporary Party Model

In democratic societies, two fundamental assumptions apply: first, that

The ideological profiles of citizens, and the way they participate in

the articulation of demand increasingly becomes the province of interest

2.2 Political Money: Why Does It Matter?

used to maintain a certain degree of control over parties (Panebianco,

importance of members; more influence of leaders and professionals; scle-

perceives financial exchanges as a form of corruption. However, money is

2.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Private Money

marginalise business financing of parties in co-ordinated economies, but

which state resources are exploited by the party in power to distribute

2.4 Linking Political Parties to Interest Groups

money—especially Big Money—in politics and the importance of taking

groups of institutions and authorities, other economic sectional groups

1998; Lehmbruch, 1977; Schattschneider, 1948), but many of these stud-

2008; Binderkrantz, 2008; Murphy, 2012; Binderkrantz, 2015). However,

Bentley, A. (1908). The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. University

Dalton, R. J. (2002). The Decline of party Identification. In R. J. Dalton &

March, G. J., & Olsen, J. P. (1984). The New Institutionalism: Organizational

1 Introduction: The Informative Power of Private Political

2 Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Political

3 Private Political Financing: Between Regulations and

4 The Connective Capability of Italian Political Parties 57

5 The Donor’s Dilemma: External Donations Between Party

6 The Financial Appeal of Political Parties: Looking for the

7 Conclusion: Winter Is Coming and Political Parties Will